RE: How do you get the non-transformed character entit

> As an aside, what is the reasoning behind attributes not
> having a single text node child?

Why would you want that? Separate text nodes are needed for element content
because child elements and text can be intermixed. They would add no value
for attributes, because there would then be a one-to-one correspondence
between the attribute node and its text node.

> It seems to me that XPath is lacking in this case.  Of those
> three, comments
> are the only ones that end up only having text within them.

No, attributes, comments, and PIs each have a string-value which gives their
content, and none of them has child text nodes.

> Attributes have
> an expanded name and text, and processing instructions have a
> 'string value'
> as defined by the spec, but also have what appear to be
> attributes (though
> they aren't defined as such).

Although processing-instructions are often written to use
"pseudo-attributes", e.g.
<?abc x="y" a="b"?>
there is nothing in XML that says they should be used in this way, it's
purely an application convention, and therefore not part of the XPath tree
model.

Mike Kay


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